WordPress 2.5 vs. Movable Type 4.1: Which One is the Winner?

This blog runs on WordPress simply because I am more familiar with the blog platform than Movable Type as of now. I firmly believe a blog is a tool. Business bloggers and independent publishers who want to use a blog for their business should really start with an ultimate outcome and strategic plan.

A blog may not even be the most suitable tool for your business and marketing strategy. Integrating a blog into your marketing mix is only feasible if you have been clear on where you want to end up and how to go there.

That’s why this blog doesn’t try to rebut about which platform is better than the other. Again, know what you want and choose the right tool to do it.

Why WordPress and Movable Type

This blog focuses on these two plus one hybrid (hosted and standalone) blog platform, Blogger. While much of the information in this site applied to other blog platforms as well, you have to adapt it to your blog explicitly.

Where Should You Start?

Like I wrote above, it is never a good idea to start with a choice of software although most of the time you can do well with any of them.

I’d recommend that you begin at the strategic level. If you need nothing more than standard installation of blog software, what’s the point in choosing WordPress because it has thousands of plugins?

Let the war between blog software be left for others. As business bloggers, we should concentrate on getting things done; build and grow your business.

Movable Type or WordPress?

Both blog tools have matured to the point you can use them for business applications. They provide an easy way to get your content up on the Web with the standard blog features like comments, trackbacks, and so on.

Since December 12th, 2007, Movable Type is now open source. MTOS (Movable Type Open Source) has every feature in Movable Type 4.0 including the plugins, themes, templates and designs.

Both software are free to use for personal, educational or commercial purpose.

WordPress is entirely developed in PHP, while Movable Type uses a mix of PHP and Perl (but mostly Perl). If you have no preference over any language, you should do very well with either one, although I’d personally recommend WordPress if you are just starting out.

Most people who are familiar with either or another won’t migrate to another platform, although both of them have a feature to import entries and comments from each other. Movable Type has a lot of features out of the box but WordPress allows you to install plugin and achieve more or less the same thing.

During a test to install both software on my two Linux web hosting accounts, I find no problem at all. WordPress installed cleanly even though support for some Perl modules are missing (not critical) for Movable Type.

With the release of TypePad AntiSpam, now Movable Type levels the comment spam filtering capability with WordPress. Some bloggers said it is better. Both are working to improve support for this, as spam comments are getting more aggressive.

Please examine the following lists carefully for benefits of each blogware.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular weblog software. Period. Look at the Alexa’s Reach graph for both blogware above.

A list of WordPress advantages over Movable Type:

More strategic information. For independent publishers and business bloggers who want to install and maintain things themselves, this means more strategic information specific to WordPress. More blogs are available to teach WordPres than Movable Type.

Ease of installation. WordPress is famous for its 5-minute installation. If you’ve ever done it, you can do it in 2 minutes or less.

More choices of plugins. This may be a benefit for some bloggers but a disadvantage for others. The fact that you can extend WordPress features by adding plugins makes it very flexible. However, adding codes that are not part of the software may introduce new security and compatibility problems.

More themes. You have more choices with WordPress. Whether you are using your WordPress as content management system or blog, you have more free options with WordPress.

Why MovableType?

Movable Type is suitable for more advanced users, especially if you can’t live without the following features:

Multiple blogs. WordPress has multiple blog version called WordPress Mu but you must install a separate package. Get ready to say good bye to the 5-minute installation too. Movable Type, on the other hand, supports multiple blogs out of the box.

More pre-installed features. Movable Type comes with many more features than WordPress. Some of these are available via WordPress plugins but others are not available as of this writing. For example, Movable Type includes OpenID commenting support on your blog.

Serving static pages. Many people wonder why Movable Type has to generate static pages while they can serve each page in real-time when a visitor requests it. Static pages are useful for high-traffic sites. This is much like the WP-Cache or WP Super Cache available as plugins in WordPress.

Still Confused?

If you are still confused, chances are these choices don’t matter at all. Go with the crowd. You can build a niche web site and blog with WordPress and it has more features than you could possibly explore with the supported plugins.

Building membership site with WordPress is possible too and can be done in different ways. You can even integrate your existing shopping cart or digital download management system.

It is interesting to see how the developments go, but for now, we have some business to do. So choose a platform, and take action!